When Tea Party AstroTurf Withers: The Jo Lynn Haussmann Story

Keller ISD board member Jo Lynn Haussmann was censured at a special meeting of the board last night. She was asked to resign, too, but that was never going to happen. She offered a half-hearted apology for the Facebook comment that led to the meeting -- the one in which she informed Southlake voters that, because of their low turnout, they were now stuck with a "MUSLIM" on City Council -- and that was it.

Short of getting Haussmann removed by a district judge, there's nothing Keller ISD can do. They are stuck with a Haussmann, a Tea Party backed and funded candidate elected with fewer than 2,200 votes.

The thing is, if anyone had been paying attention to a suburban school board election, and Unfair Park realizes that's a big if, this whole mess probably could have been avoided. Rumors -- with a decent amount of documentation -- about Haussmann's bigotry and her self-admitted dementia have been floating around for months, before she was even elected.

The Rosetta Stone for Haussmann's Facebook posts about dementia is the Vimeo video embedded below. It's been on the site since late April and in its description the uploader says he or she posted it to preserve Haussmann's posts in case they were deleted, which they seem to have been. The video appears to show a computer user doing a simple Google search and click through to find Haussmann discussing her dementia and inability to work or function as she did before the diseases's onset.

A quick Google search shows further indications that the posts came from Haussmann's account. Results from Facebook's mobile site appear to record some of the content of the deleted posts.

So, the Tea Party, and Tea Party backed state representatives like Giovanni Capriglione of Southlake, got behind a school board candidate who apparently has dementia. That's probably something that should have been checked out, but they couldn't possibly have imagined that she was capable of spewing such bile on social media right?

If a screen shot tweeted by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Bud Kennedy is any indication, Haussmann's proponents should have expected far, far worse.

Those are YouTube comments from 2012. They come from an account that features Haussmann's name and the photo that appears on much of her campaign literature. It's possible that someone was setting up a long con smearing of Haussmann in 2012, but she, apparently, believes that President Obama is a Muslim/socialist/communist who should be beheaded.

Jo Lynn Haussmann and Representative Capriglione did not respond to requests for comment for this story.